The Stone Killer

The hero is Charles Bronson, who possibly does not have 750 words of dialog in the entire movie (he talks even less than Clint Eastwood). Bronson doesn’t need the dialog. He acts with his body, which is muscular and catlike and strangely expansive; we never catch him just standing there. He always seems ready to pounce.

There’s one scene where he’s got a gunman cornered behind a door, and the gunman is shooting through the door. From a flat-footed standing start, Bronson simply leaps three feet up in the air to the top of a table, kicks open the door and nails the guy. To be sure, scenes like that don’t win Academy Awards. But Bronson’s sheer physicality makes the scene convincing; he’s the most athletic of the current male superstars, and he’s the one we’d back in a fight. The movie’s plot is totally preposterous. Bronson is on a trail of dead bodies that leads, ultimately, to a Mafia don (Martin Balsam). The don has hired a cadre of Vietnam veterans to stage an ambush that will wipe out the entire Italian mob leadership, thus gaining revenge for a series of assassinations of Sicilians on April 10, 1931. The long-delayed vengeance is just an excuse for this story; it gives some small measure of plausibility to a movie that’s really about violence and chase scenes.

Of which there is a beauty. Bronson, in a car, is after a killer on a motorcycle. Together they crash through a handicraft fair, jump railroad tracks, burst through warehouses and used-car dealerships, and raise hell in general. It’s an exhilarating scene, magnificently choreographed, with a lot of difficult stunts well planned. And with Bronson at the wheel, you can relax; you know he’s not going to stop for a little well-chosen dialog.